Billionaire businessman and A-list art collector Eli Broad (say " brode " ) is well known in Los Angeles as a cultural and political heavyweight (he was the force behind the founding of LA’s Museum of Contemporary Art and is credited with bringing the 2000 Democratic National Convention to the City of Angels), but his name is less familiar around here. Or has been until now. Some may remember the wonderful exhibition " The Mediated Object " that was drawn from the Broad Collections and mounted at Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum in 1996, but it’s safe to assume that the MFA’s summer blockbuster " Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons: Four Decades of Art from the Broad Collections, " which opens this Sunday, will introduce a whole new New England audience to the holdings of Eli and his wife, Edythe. And yes, it is " Collections. " Starting in the 1970s, the Broads began buying art to hang in their home near Los Angeles. In 1984, they formed the Broad Art Foundation, with the explicit purpose of lending work to museums and university galleries. By now, the couple’s holdings, between their personal collection and the holdings of their foundation, number more than 1000 works by 150 artists.

" Jasper Johns to Jeff Koons " traces the origins of Pop, the roots of Conceptual art, and the emergence of photography as a fine-art medium. It is a greatest-hits compilation, featuring high-profile art luminaries who were at the height of their fame in the star-studded ’80s, with works from the ’60s and ’70s providing context and works from the ’90s that are indebted. It also reflects the ’80s’ overrepresentation of the unfairer sex. Still, that’s the great thing about having the resources to accumulate an over-the-top fabulous art collection (or two). Eli and Edythe bought the best that was being created by the artists they most admired, and there are bona fide masterpieces here.

This is the MFA’s biggest contemporary-art exhibition in a long time — the first in the Gund Gallery since 1996. The show is so big, it spills out into the rest of the museum, including the West Wing Lobby, where Jeff Koons’s big blue, stainless-steel Balloon Dog (1994-2001) greets (and reflects) visitors. Outside the entrance, Robert Therrien’s precarious-looking seven-foot stack of white dinner plates, No Title (1993), looms large. Scale, and over-scale, is a recurring theme. Therrien’s Under the Table (1994) is an enormous re-creation of the artist’s studio table and chairs that you can walk under and around. Charles Ray’s Fall ’91 (1992), an eight-foot-tall brunette mannequin with red nails in a big red power suit, stares impassively over your head, hands on hips. Stephan Balkenhol’s carved and painted Large Woman with Green Pants (1996) and Large Classical Man (1996) also exceed eight feet in height. The funhouse nature of these mammoth objects injects a sense of humor into the otherwise very straightforward installation of mostly two-dimensional works.

Another piece that overflows from the exhibition is Jeff Koons’s stainless-steel bust of Louis XIV (1986), which has been unobtrusively placed on a pedestal in a small gallery displaying examples of 17th- and 18th-century French decorative arts. I like to imagine that Koons’s gleaming reproduction of the Sun King and the elaborate silver cistern and pitcher nearby have some pretty lively conversations after the guards have gone home for the evening.

But back to the two-dimensional works. The contemporary masterpieces assembled here are a rare pleasure, even though many may be familiar from reproduction or from gallery and museum exhibitions. The Broads are committed to collecting key artists in depth, so most works can be seen in the context of the artist’s personal development. Jasper Johns is represented by seven works dated between 1960 and 1991, including the iconic Flag (1967), in which you can see the artist’s masterful use of collage and his signature encaustic technique. Viewing Flag next to Watchman (1964) — in which Johns incorporated part of a broken chair and the cast of a human thigh and leg into a brushy, abstract painting — reveals the artist’s exploration at the boundary of figuration and abstraction and his early use of found imagery and objects.

Roy Lichtenstein, who was a close friend of the Broads, is represented by 10 paintings, including one downstairs outside the Foster Gallery. Several of Lichtenstein’s famous comic-book style paintings are here, and they look as fresh as ever. The ominous green tank in Live Ammo (Blang!) (1962) rolls over you as if it had been painted yesterday. Mirror #1 (1969) and Two Paintings: Radiator and Folded Sheets (1983) show how Lichtenstein continued to use his signature Ben-day dot technique to explore light, reflection, and the relationship between painting and life. And the series Rouen Cathedral (Seen at Five Different Times of the Day) Set III (1969) is one of several fine examples of the artist’s reinterpretations of the pioneers of modern art, from Monet to Picasso. Both Lichtenstein and Johns were important to the Conceptual artists as well as to the New Imagist painters who emerged in the 1980s, and these works show why.

Holding up the West Coast end of the spectrum, pieces by Ed Ruscha and John Baldessari display the wit and irony that informed the birth of the Conceptual art movement. Photography and pop culture (especially Hollywood) figure in the work of both artists, as do words and language. Baldessari’s Tips for Artists (1967-’68) is a sharp, funny commentary on commercial aspects of the art world. Having found the text that makes up the painting in an art magazine, he hired a sign painter to put it on canvas.

The 17 works by artist Cindy Sherman span three decades, the Broads having collected almost every image ever created by this influential and enigmatic artist. Sherman’s photographs of herself in a vast variety of get-ups, poses, disguises, and settings have broken new ground for artists, and they were instrumental in bringing photography into the realm of fine art. Eight images from her famous " Untitled Film Stills " series, dating between 1977 and 1980, are here; my favorites include Untitled Film Still #7 (1978), where the artist looks a bit like the young and beautiful Liz Taylor, emerging from sliding glass doors with big sunglasses and a martini. In 2000, Sherman created a series of photographs of women seated without props in front of plain backgrounds, in exaggerated, hideous make-up with fake teeth, obvious wigs, overwrought French manicures, and putty nose reconstructions. Following the stylized actresses, historical figures, and decomposing body parts that have made up earlier segments of her work, this dead-on examination of contemporary " types " of women is unnerving and hypnotic, as Sherman continues to create images that we recognize as " familiar " even though they’re completely invented and elusive.

It’s good to see some of the best old works of Anselm Kiefer, including the fragile and haunting Nuremberg (1982), with its cascade of straw affixed to canvas and painted to appear burnt, tortured, torrential. Making explicit connections to Richard Wagner, Nuremberg examines the fraught relationship between Germany’s rich cultural history and its horrible recent past. Kiefer’s art is the most political work in the show.

It is the much-touted figurative painters of the ’80s whose work holds the least draw for me. A single smashed plate painting by Julian Schnabel, two inscrutable David Salle canvases, and two psychologically charged, garishly painted canvases by Eric Fischl remind me of the excitement surrounding this provocative group, but these pieces still seem less compelling than the works around them. For psychological depth and expressive metaphor, I’d take Jeff Koons’s Rabbit (1986) or Michael Jackson and Bubbles (1988) any day of the week.

To judge from this slice of their collections, the Broads have for the most part acquired extremely fine examples of the prevailing art of our times. It’s work that will continue to inform the road figurative and pop-related art has taken and is taking.